Embracing Discomfort: Running’s Greatest Teacher

No matter what your relationship with running is, pain and discomfort will be there to meet you with a lovely embrace. Discomfort shows up in every form you can imagine—intense and pointed, mild and engulfing. It’ll find you during runs, between runs, when you wake up in the middle of the night with a cramp, and during the fury and chaos of a race. You can’t run from it; you’ve got to run straight into it. Nothing makes seconds feel like hours quite like a good dose of excruciating pain. But these moments of discomfort hold crucial lessons that can ripple out into the rest of your life.

Good Pain vs. Bad Pain

There’s good pain, and there’s bad pain, and figuring out the difference is one of the core lessons of being a runner. Good pain pushes you and challenges you; bad pain is a warning sign that something’s wrong. I’m not here to tell you to run through injuries—that’s a line you’ll have to figure out for yourself. Having trusted training partners and medical professionals in your corner can help. What I’m here to talk about is “good pain”—the discomfort that’s not putting you in danger but is instead teaching you something about yourself. (There’s some grey area here that could fill its own blog post.)

When you’re constantly facing discomfort you can’t just get rid of, you’re forced to learn to cope, deal, and accept it. It’s easy to try to push it away or ignore it, but it’ll always be there. Sometimes it shouts; sometimes it whispers. Either way, it’s not going anywhere. That’s the thing about discomfort: it’s a constant presence, but it can also be a great teacher. Discomfort allows for a space to look inward and discover things about ourselves that few other experiences can reveal. What you learn in these moments is yours to carry into the rest of your life.

Staring Down Discomfort

I have felt perhaps the most alive I have ever felt when staring this discomfort down the barrel. And it’s certainly not always easy to have perspective in these moments, as they’re oftentimes physically and emotionally distressing (again, we’re talking below the line of “bad pain”). But it’s these moments that offer us the space to explore ourselves in the moment, and to reflect back upon. These moments will show up at any time. During races, between runs, before races, after races, etc.

One of my favorite examples of facing discomfort is the start line of a cross country race. Anyone who has run a cross country race can tell you about the jumbled emotional mess of fear, excitement, nerves, and exhilaration they feel on the start line of a race. Hundreds of runners crowd onto a start line, each of their unique journey’s having led them to this exact time and place. The energy in this moment is nearly indescribable, find a cross country race near you and go check it out for yourself. When the whistle blows to call the runners to the line, there’s an extremely tense moment of silence, and the moment stands still for a second. Still, but filled with immeasurable tension, excitement, and hope (someone should write a book on this). Each runner on that starting line is facing it all in a singular metaphorical (but also extremely literal) moment. They are brutally aware of the physical discomfort that lies ahead, they’re existing in a moment of emotional discomfort. But the best athletes can allow this discomfort to occur without dismantling their ability to execute what needs to be executed. Learning to lean into these uncomfortable moments and allow them to happen has been one of the greatest lessons I’ve taken from my running and applied to life in general.

The Pain Cave

One of my favorite ways to conceptualize handling immediate physical pain and discomfort was explained by Courtney Dauwalter on the Rich Roll Podcast. Courtney paints a picture of the “pain cave,” and provides insight into how she imagines chipping away at the walls of the pain cave to create a bigger cave. Further, instead of fearing the pain cave, she looks forward to the opportunity to meet it head on, to dig in, and go to work chipping away from the inside of the cave. You're going to be existing in the pain cave either way, so shifting your mindset to embrace it is a small and difficult, but meaningful and effective switch. From my experience, exploring this moment of maximum discomfort and creating strategies to excel here, is as crucial to executing a race as any pacing strategy may be. This can be done through mantras, queues, imagery, or anything else that brings you into the current moment, focusing on something you can control. Going to one of these strategies when you’re facing mounting discomfort in a race will bring you into the present moment and help keep your mind on task. Giving your mind a task to focus on also keeps you from projecting your current level of discomfort into an assumed level of future discomfort. Discomfort during a race is never as linear as our minds like to assume it is. You will go through periods of feeling great, as well as periods of feeling terrible, so staying present and limiting these future projections will lead to better execution, less tension, and ultimately better performance. From my experience, tactics such as these teach you to allow the discomfort to exist, while you put your mental and physical energy elsewhere. Instead of tensing up, and trying to avoid the inevitable discomfort, you simultaneously reallocate your mental and physical tools to something more useful. Learning to allow the uncontrollable, and often unpleasant, things in life is another great piece of wisdom that will take you far in life (this warrants its own blog post).

The Artist’s Canvas

Discomfort shows up in so many ways in running, and how you deal with it is deeply personal. These moments are like a blank canvas, giving you space to express yourself and learn who you are. They teach you to embrace what most people avoid, and that’s where the magic happens.

Next time you’re deep in a moment of discomfort, lean in. Not many people get to go where you’re going. Discomfort, despite the negative connotation we assign it, is one of the greatest teachers.

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